Rob Walley

Senior Partner

Bourton Group 

Over the last 25 years, Rob has developed successful relationships with businesses in a wide range sectors including Construction and Infrastructure in both Public and Private sectors. Rob is recognised as an Industry expert in the deployment of Lean within the Roads and Infrastructure sector and he leads Bourton Group’s work throughout the Construction and Infrastructure sector. He has a reputation for successfully managing complex Lean improvement programmes as well as multi-disciplinary business reorganisations often helping complex, regulated organisations improve their operational performance.

Rob is also a Director of the International Consulting Network, a collaboration of a number of international consulting organisations of which Bourton Group is a founder member.
Outside Bourton Group, Rob has held senior, board level managerial positions and has a BEng (Honours) degree in Production Engineering and Production Management from Nottingham University.

Sarah Beale

Chief Executive

CITB

Sarah became Chief Executive of CITB in January 2017.

Sarah is passionate about promoting the need for diversity within a workforce and the business value that it can bring, from the productivity gains to thought leadership. Sarah uses this passion to help address and influence the skills needs of the construction industry and, through her leadership, seeks to add value to the sector; whether it is encouraging young people into the industry, training and developing those already in the workforce or building a more positive, inclusive image of the sector.

Since appointment Sarah has launched an ambitious three-year Vision 2020 programme of significant reform which will see the organisation become more responsive and valued by the industry it serves. Sarah’s focus is now to ensure that Vision 2020 programme
becomes reality.

Prior to her most recent appointment Sarah has held a number of senior roles within CITB and before that in finance based roles in both commercial environments and not‐for‐profit organisations. She has led on several transformational programmes, including company mergers, systems development and a variety of people and management-related projects.

Peter Mumford

Executive Director

Highways England

Peter is Highways England’s Executive Director for Major Projects and Capital Portfolio Management, having held the post since September 2017. In his role, Peter is responsible for leading the delivery of the governments £15BN investment into the strategic road network through a national team of some 800 people, whilst also helping to lead the broader business across all of its activity. Prior to this role, Peter has held a number of senior positions as Partner and Director at leading international engineering and construction consultancy organisations, working both in the UK and internationally.

Keith Waller

Programme Director

Construction Innovation Hub

Keith Waller is the Construction Innovation Hub’s Programme Director. A Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Keith has been involved in construction and infrastructure projects for over 30 years, leading many major projects in both the UK and overseas.

In 2010, Keith was seconded into government with Infrastructure UK (the predecessor to the Infrastructure and Projects Authority). He has served on several boards and cross-Whitehall groups, including the Infrastructure Client Group, the Offshore Wind Programme Board, Infrastructure Working Group of the Green Construction Board and the Government Construction Board. He has also advised a number of foreign governments on strategic infrastructure planning and delivery.

A keen advocate of driving innovative and productive solutions, his work in government led to the publication of the UK’s first National Infrastructure Plan, the development of the Infrastructure Cost Review and the IPA’s Transforming Infrastructure Performance programme, published in 2017.

Kevin McHugh

Associate Director

Mace

With a Masters’ degree in Operations Management, Kevin brings experience from a uniquely diverse series of roles he has undertaken during his career to date, working as a Senior Project Engineer, Planner & Project Manager, he has developed an in depth understanding of what it takes to deliver lean construction projects and the requirements for applying lean techniques to underpin each stage of a project.

With a Masters’ degree in Operations Management, Kevin brings experience from a uniquely diverse series of roles he has undertaken during his career to date, working as a Senior Project Engineer, Planner & Project Manager, he has developed an in depth understanding of what it takes to deliver lean construction projects and the requirements for applying lean techniques to underpin each stage of a project.

With a Masters’ degree in Operations Management, Kevin brings experience from a uniquely diverse series of roles he has undertaken during his career to date, working as a Senior Project Engineer, Planner & Project Manager, he has developed an in depth understanding of what it takes to deliver lean construction projects and the requirements for applying lean techniques to underpin each stage of a project.

Menno de Jonge

Director of Digital Construction

Royal BAM Group

As a Director Digital Construction of Royal BAM Group, Menno is leading BAM to its position as a leader in digital construction in the international construction industry. With over 30 years of experience within the European construction industry, and in construction technology, Menno brings perspectives from both sides of the technology spectrum. Menno has been responsible for IT implementations in the area of CAD, BIM, Lean Construction, Data and Document Management, ERP, HRM, Asset Management and more, and is highly active in European industry standards bodies.

Brian Swain

Chairman

The Lean Construction Institute UK

Brian Swain is Chairman of The Lean Construction Institute UK, and an organisational development consultant with twenty five years’ experience working in construction, manufacturing and service companies throughout the UK and Western Europe.

He often typifies his approach as individual, organisational and corporate coaching.

Brian’s work is focused on the Lean Transformation of companies through team building and personal development within the context of process management, continuous improvement and organisational design. He works at all levels in large and small organisations but with a primary focus on Value Stream Development in regard to a company’s strategic and operational imperatives.

Additionally, Brian has project managed and co-authored textbooks and manuals for work-based management development. He is a founding Director of Rubicon Associates, Brian Swain Ltd, Lean Construction International and The Lean Construction Institute UK (LCI-UK).

Steve Savage

Operations and People Director

Citu

Steve trained as an electrical and mechanical engineering apprentice before going on to study design and management at university. He worked for BMW for a decade where he oversaw the production of more than two million MINIs at the company’s plant in Oxford. His automotive industry background and proven expertise in streamlining manufacturing processing aligns perfectly with Citu’s approach, who are an innovative UK developer tackling climate change head-on, by combining lean and passive house principles to provide customer value while helping them to reduce their carbon footprint.

Citu’s ambition is to be a disruptor of housing: zero-carbon, innovative, and using cutting edge technology to create great places to live, work, learn and play. Citu’s unique story includes an integrated project delivery model with an off-site manufacturing facility, multi-skilled trade “squads” and much more!

Nicole Preston

Head of Operational Excellence (A14)

Balfour Beatty, A14 Integrated Delivery Team

Nicole has worked as a Civil Engineer for Balfour Beatty for 10 years. She started as a Section Engineer in 2009 working her way up the Engineers grades, now achieving Head of Operational Excellence for Balfour Beatty Southern Regional Investment Programme. She is lucky enough to be managing Lean on the A14, the country’s largest infrastructure project, valued at £1.5b.

Since she arrived on the A14 project three years ago, she has led the continuous improvement culture, embedding the Operational Excellence Strategy, starting with rolling out a new ideas process, encouraging improved innovative ways of working, giving everyone the ability to add value and reduce costs for all parties involved. She then linked this into the Risk and Opportunity process, ensuring all good ideas/efficiencies have business cases and commercially assured by the client.

The aim of Nicole's Operational Excellence team on the A14 is to lower operational risk and lower operating costs, creating value for customers, supply chain and stakeholders, whilst beholding the highest safety and quality standards. Operational Excellence goes beyond the benefits model of improvement, towards a long-term change in organisation culture. By empowering the delivery team to identify a smarter way of working enables cost savings to be realised, and critical programme demands met or improved upon. Through a Lean methodology using Lean tools and techniques to enable bottlenecks to be identified, measured and mitigated. Nicole lead a team that focused on meeting customer expectation through continuous improvement of the operational delivery, mapping construction processes, finding the root cause for non-completion and error proofing repeated activity. It is described as doing the right thing, the right way, every time, reducing waste and increasing productivity.

Nicole has led the A14 project through ISO44001 accreditation, through strong project collaborative relationships, scoring industry high Collaborative Performance Framework (CPF) scores and hitting the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). Proving they are world class and industry leading.

Craig Davies

Group World Class Manufacturing Manager

Citu 

Craig studied Product Design and Manufacturing Engineering at Loughborough and Warwick University before starting his career in the Automotive sector. It was during the 5 years in this sector that Craig’s passion for Lean really grew, leading to him becoming a Lean6Sigma Black Belt. Craig then spent a decade working in FMCG for Molson Coors, initially leading the Lean change program at one of their UK sites, and latterly moving into Engineering and Operations Leadership roles at the UKs biggest brewer. Craig’s experience in leading change within manufacturing organisations is well aligned with Citu’s strategy for growth and development of the organisation. He is leading the deployment of Citu Production System, Citu’s approach to combine day-to-day construction stability with team-led Continuous Improvement to tackle climate change head on.

Duncan Elliott

Managing Director of the Highways business

Galliford Try

Duncan Elliott is the Managing Director of the Highways business unit within Galliford Try.

Duncan has fulfilled a leading role across the construction industry for many years and operated within the water, energy, environment, highways and regional civil engineering sectors

He has fulfilled leading roles within several collaborative contracting arrangements and representing many of the large construction organisations and supplier partners within the UK in addition to many years of Joint Venture working

As a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers Duncan is motivated by an ambition to lead improving performance within the construction industry through flourishing people; looking forward to the days when our industry doesn’t harm anyone, it returns good margins for good performance and more than satisfies the needs and wishes of its clients

The Galliford Try Highways Business is growing rapidly with great people and currently delivers for numerous Local Authorities and Highways England across the country

David Anderson

Head of Business, Process and Quality for BAM Nuttall

BAM Nuttall

David has over 30 years experience within the construction industry across multiple sectors. His background in project management and delivery has allows him to really understand the value chain across the whole project lifecycle. He has a wide background in Lean development and deployment and is a current director of the Lean Construction Institute and a chair of the ENCORD Lean work group ( ENCORD is a European wide construction research and development group). He is responsible for leading the strategic deployment of Lean thinking across BAM Nuttall and leads a wider Royal BAM Group aimed at increasing Lean maturity across all operations worldwide. He is passionate about developing peoples Lean thinking to enable everyone to work together in a smarter, collaborative efficient manner no matter what their role.

Sharon Banks

Head of Lean and Continuous Improvement

Highways England

Sharon Banks has had a career with the British Government spanning nearly 40 years, with extensive experience in both Programme and Operational Management, having managed diverse teams ranging from small specialism’s to wide national delivery with responsibility for over 3000 people.

Having been trained by Toyota Sensai in the Lean approach Sharon has spent the last 15 years developing and implementing Lean Strategies across Government. She has helped a variety of areas to meet the stringent demands of Government policy, most notably Department for Work and Pensions, where she was instrumental in enabling them in reducing the workforce by 20,000 whilst at the same time increasing productivity by over 10%.

During the last 5 years Sharon has been deploying Lean within the construction industry at Highways England. As a newly formed Government Company Highways England has a huge challenge in meeting the increased demand for efficient infrastructure. It is also developing its future business model to respond to the Digital world around us. As Head of Lean Sharon believes the construction industry is on the brink of a revolution and that Lean is the enabler that will provide the firm foundation on which this bright new future can be built.

Grant Findlay

Director of Business Development and Work Winning

Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd

Grant Findlay is a Chartered Civil Engineer with over 25 years of experience in the engineering and construction industry. He is director of new business and work winning for Sir Robert McAlpine. He has previously held project and business leadership positions, and has a proven track record for delivering nationally and internationally significant projects and programmes of work, which includes;

• A74(M) Glasgow to Carlisle, for Scottish Office
• Trans-Asian Highway No 1, Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh
• Express Rail Link, Malaysia
• New Accommodation Project for GCHQ
• Broadcast and media facilities for London 2012 Olympics
• Project Allenby Connaught for MoD
• European HQ for Bloomberg

Grant is passionately committed to skills development in the construction sector by improving links between enterprise and education; he is the Construction Sector Advisor to the Career College Trust, founded in 2014 by Lord Baker.

This year, he has been instrumental in establishing the Construction Data Trust, with the aim of transforming the delivery of construction projects through the application of data analytics to securely stored and pooled data. 

Matt Stacey

Divisional Director

Highways, BAM Nuttall

Matt was responsible for leading the creation and development of the BAM Nuttall Highways Division into the successful business it is today.

Having worked collaboratively for more than thirty years on major projects, highways and waterways frameworks and term contracts, Matt has maximised the benefits of integrated team working. His management approach has helped transform financial and safety performance and has led to strong client and team relations.

Well respected for his relationship skills with clients, partners and his own team, Matt seeks to unite all parties to rationalise alternative points of view to find a mutually rewarding way to resolve challenges.

He has embedded a culture of collaborative working practices and champions the benefits of behavioural management, lean management, value engineering, innovation and teamwork.

Matt recognises there are plenty more opportunities for further improvement and so is driving efficiency through the application of lean across the whole business process, drawing upon the full potential of technology and digital construction to unlock future efficiencies. This aligns with BAM’s vision to ensure we have a business fit for the future challenges and opportunities.